Health, Normality Disability

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

The concept of health is notoriously hard to define. Not just historical, but also contemporary examples abound showing health to be fundamentally contextual and contested, whether along lines of cultural differences, religious differences, or even differences pertaining to the practice of science itself. Because healthcare is central to2 much of modern life, the difficulty to define and understand health is not just a theoretical oddity, but a practical problem. A core premise of this course is that one cannot inquire into the meaning of health without also inquiring into the meaning of normality and disability. With a special focus on recent debates in the philosophy of medicine, we will closely study works including Elizabeth Barnes' Health Problems, Sean Valles' The Philosophy of Population Health, Robert Chapman's Empire of Normality, and Georges Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological. Throughout, we will seek to situate the concept of health relative to larger, politically pressing concerns in social ontology and epistemology as well as in bioethics and public health.